I'm thoroughly confused about the dates that are scattered throughout this thread. My last visit to Seattle had to be in 1954. I first left for New York the year of the Army/McCarthy hearings ("Senator, have you no shame?"). I know this because I hiked uptown every day to watch them on the television in a YMCA lobby. Then I spent the next summer in Toledo, Ohio, doing summer stock with the Mad Anthony Players. Hitch-hiked back to Seattle, got the great and embarrassing send-off described in an earlier thread, with Walt providing the major entertainment as a favor. I took the collected donations, gratefully, and hitch-hiked back toward New York. Turned back to Toledo where I'd been told I could actually earn some money singing the old songs I had been singing for fun. That appealed to me more than hauling furniture from a delivery truck up to a fourth floor apartment (hide-a-beds were a hot item that year, and those suckers weigh a ton!)

PERSONAL ASIDE: Mitch Woodbury, Entertainment Editor of the Toledo Blade had told me he could get me some singing jobs any time I felt the urge to turn pro. First he tried to sign me with the Johnny Long Orchestra, doing pop schlock. I said I wanted to sing folksongs. Long said I could do a few of them during the band's breaks. Big money for those days, but "No thanks," says I, heroically, always ready to be a martyr for folk art. So Mitch booked me into the cocktail lounge of the Park Lane Hotel, where I sang four nights a week for six months. Quit the gig when I was invited by a former theater acquaintance to a party in Richmond, Virginia, where Paul Clayton would also be a guest. I wanted to meet him, so I left my heavy gear (books) with a friend and hitch-hiked to Richmond. Nice party. Lots of songs!

Now this had to be 1954, or '55 at the latest. By 1957 I had drifted back to California, met Caroline in Berkeley, kidnapped her from the ranks of respectability, and the two of us hitch-hiked across the country together to go to England and learn more about traditional folksongs. (I wanted to sit at the feet of Ewan MacColl.) Sailed from New York, had our first-born son as a free baby on the National Health in 1958 (let's hear it for socialized medicine!!). Went collecting in Scotland, and returned to the US in the fall of 1958.

Since Walt was back in Seattle in '54, and I saw the big 12-string he got from Carbone (after the army, I'm sure), he must have done his extended hitch before the '57 date Don mentions above. Yet Don clearly knew Walt for a much longer period of time than I did, so -- I am totally bewildered by the conflicting dates.

Senator Joe McCarthy began his purge of the State Department ("I have here in my hand a list of names of Communist subversives in the State Department!" -- actually, he later admitted it was a laundry list, or something of that nature) in 1951. The Washington State Legislature's "Canwell Committee" (a rubber stamp of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee that plagued Hollywood in 1947) went to work in Seattle in 1948, attacking professors at the University and, incidentally, the directors of the Seattle Repertory Playhouse where I was still pretending to be an actor. (Another aside: Lee Payant had been an actor there before my time, but had already gone to Paris and started L'Abbaye by '47, when I arrived on the scene.) Those witch-hunts are another story altogether, but they help to set the dates in my head.

So -- when the hell was Walt in Europe with the Army? When did he get back to Seattle for the big "welcome home" party so beautifully described here? Was he in the army from around '51 to '54, say, when I got to know him? Was the big '57 songswap/celebration honoring his return from one of his other wanderings? And, after all, does it really matter?

Sandy (who is sure that he got married in '57)